Take Nobody's Word For It: How Science Lost Its Founding Virtue

"Trust the science" is a phrase Robert Boyle would have found horrifying. The Royal Society he co-founded in 1660 inscribed exactly the opposite principle on its coat of arms: Nullius in verba — take nobody's word for it. Modern science was built as an anti-authority institution, forged in the wreckage of two decades of religious civil war that had killed roughly two hundred thousand Englishmen…